German federal police say British hacker arrested in London

BERLIN â€” A 29-year-old Briton was taken into custody in London on a European arrest warrant issued by Germany on suspicion of a carrying out a cyberattack on Deutsche Telekom, federal police said Thursday.

Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office, or BKA, said the man, whose name wasn’t released, is suspected of conducting a cyberattack on an internet access router in November that meant more than 1 million Deutsche Telekom customers couldn’t go online.

The suspect, who was arrested Wednesday at a London airport, allegedly planned to hack the router to integrate it into a networked “botnet” for cybercrimes, the BKA said in a statement. A botnet is a number of internet-connected devices used to perform various tasks including sending spam or stealing data.

German prosecutors said the Briton allegedly offered to sell the botnet over the so-called darknet â€” an area of cyberspace invisible on the open internet often used for illegal activity â€” for “attack scenarios like so-called DDoS attacks.”

A DDoS, or “Distributed Denial of Service,” attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources.